


When the Realms Were Young

by illwynd



Category: Norse Religion & Lore, Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Battle, Bear Thor, M/M, Mating, Nature, Nature vs. Civilization, Serious Injuries, Shapeshifter Loki, Shapeshifter Thor, Shapeshifting, Tumblr Prompt, quasi-bestiality, what do you call it when they're both shapeshifters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-03 16:40:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5298629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the realms were young they belonged to the giants. When the Aesir appear, giving battle, it seems they should have no chance against their more dangerous foe. Except they have among them Thor Odinson, Giant-killer…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to a prompt from the awesome and very patient [Pyrebomb](http://pyrebomb.tumblr.com/), who asked for shapeshifter Thor, recalling “one legend in particular, tied with the Norse tradition of berserkers, about a general who would take to his tent every battle and send out his spirit in the form of a bear.” It has taken me over a year, but it feels oddly winter-season-appropriate so I’ve decided to go ahead and post it now. 
> 
> Also, it came very close to being titled "Hey Honey, What's Ursine" because I'm terrible like that.

All of this began when the realms were young.

In those days all was wilderness: vast plains of ice and snow and deadly cold, bordered by lands where even the rock and the soil were red with flame. Pitiless mountains with bottomless seas below. Deep forests hung with shadows and strangled in silence, black moss and dark roots and soft rustling sounds of unseen life. Perilous places.

In those days the giants ruled, in their simple way. They lived behind boulders and in caves, walked across those endless plains as if a journey of a thousand years were but a day. They gave no thought to cleanliness; rain bathed them. They barely felt the biting wind. A stag might stumble too close to a giant’s camp and become a meal, bones crunching, blood splashing. The giants knew no danger and felt no fear.

In those days the Aesir were not even a rumor yet, but that rumor would come.

And then there would be war.

*

The battle was still far away when Loki heard about it. In fact, he had been hearing about it for some time, but always as a distant thing, curious but unimportant, like a far-off shadow of darkling clouds.

He had listened intently to the stories being told of a new race now abroad in the realms. They seemed to have been birthed into existence out of nothing—practically overnight, by the giants’ reckoning—and wherever they went, they _changed things_. They would come into a valley of wild grassland; behind them, when they moved onward, would be a pasture. Beasts they tamed and penned and raised. Wood they carved and stone they clove, and rough leather tents turned into huts turned into sturdy houses with high thatched roofs. They forged metal into axes that they brought to the great woods, and smoke rose over their settlements. They cultivated orchards and fields of tall grain, their crops they laid out in rows. They cut the soil and turned rivers aside.

In the blink of a giant’s eye, the Aesir multiplied, and they spread like a flow of sap in spring, changing the realms wherever they went. Wetting the ground with blood whenever they and giants met and clashed.

Not all of the blood spilled was Aesir blood, though. At first the giants slew them, gnawed their bones. But the Aesir were many and crafty, and soon they put up a true fight.

Loki’s ears had perked up when he first heard that, but it was at that point still so far away that he soon forgot it again.

At least four centuries passed before the new people became more than a distant rumor to him. Loki—Loki who seemed to travel on the winds, wandering to and fro as whim took him, careless of the passage of sun and moon across the sky—had by some luck never crossed the newcomers’ paths in all that time. He had picked his careful way through Muspelheim, trekked across the hard grey lands of Utgard, and not even the flocking birds brought the rumor of battles there. Loki spent long days paddling himself down winding rivers under the gloomy skies of Nidavellir, trailing his fingers through cool green water, and never an As did he see.

Only now, in the forests of Alfheim, was he met with more than rumor.  

Loki—who was perhaps the only giant ever to bother with any of the other queer little races of folk who dwelt in the wilderness—had been wheedling hospitality from a group of elves he’d stumbled across in his travels. He sat cross-legged on the ground so as to remain at eye-level, licking the grease of their meal from his fingers and intercepting the skin of wine as it was passed around, but while this usually would have been an enjoyable diversion, that day the elven-folk took his presence oddly. He watched, wary, as they argued amongst themselves in low voices, in their private speech, glancing his direction when they thought he wasn’t looking.

The elf woman who led them, a crown of leaves and flowers wound into her yellow hair, had the last word after some time. Then she spoke to him.

“We are going north; you’re welcome to join us, if you would like.”

Loki’s smile wavered. The elves generally put up with him because while he was a nuisance, letting him stay was easier—and politer—than trying to get him to leave. Such a company would never have willingly invited him to join in their travels. Most likely they’d have waited for him to bed down and then disappeared in the night, swift as they were able.

“Why?” he asked.

“We flee to avoid the battles, of course,” the elf woman said, her pale brow twisting. “The Aesir do not attempt to harm us, but they tend also not to _see_ us underfoot, so it is best if we are elsewhere. You, though, you they _would_ harm. And we haven’t any grudge against the giants, ourselves.”

Loki stared, ignoring her last sentiment—he had not known the Aesir were in Alfheim.  

The elves told him that the battlefields in the war of Aesir against Jotnar were now scattered across the realms—including this one—like campfires dotting a hillside at night. They told him that their little group contained but a last few stragglers in this area, those who’d chosen late to leave their homes, and the Aesir were perhaps only days away.

Loki blinked a few times and snatched at the wine when it came around again. But then at the end of the night he thanked them and said that he would be making his own way, as he always did. In the morning he waited just long enough to see them set out north before turning to follow the trail that led the way they had come.

Perhaps he should have run instead. But he had to see these Aesir for himself, these folk who would conquer all the realms. He had to discover what they were like, too soft to dwell in the caves and woods as everything had done before them yet hardy enough to do battle with the giants. He wanted to see for himself these people who called themselves gods.

He wanted to know also whether in the end they might win.

*

Loki—Loki the sly, Loki shape-changer—went forth as a hawk, wind stirring under his wings at the lofty heights, until he spotted the unmistakable signs of an army on the move. The ground behind them was a trampled brown trail,  with hints of motion to be seen here and there through the canopy of leaves, all traveling the same way. But he wished to see them closer than that, and he swooped with an instinctive cry.

On four legs he approached them next as the day drew on. He had run the last several miles, out of caution, padding along silently and sniffing at the air with his ruddy-furred muzzle. He smelled them, that time, long before he saw them.

It was not the smell of giants—like stone or ash or ice, hinted with moss and wind and earth—nor quite like the smell of beasts. It was strange. Unsettling. A bit sour. He twitched his tail as he started off again.  

When he thought he had to be nearly upon them, the careless crash of feet through the forest sent him skidding to his belly in the underbrush. Hiding there with a low bush concealing him, peeking out from between clusters of berries, he saw not Aesir, but giants. A pair of them thundering past, fleeing in haste.

They did not see him (and even if they had, they hardly would have recognized the little fox as one of their kind) but he studied them, and it took him a moment to place the expression he saw upon their faces. A giant in the wilderness had rarely any reason to feel afraid. But these two were.

As the sounds of them faded into silence, Loki crept out and stared the way they’d come—toward the Aesir army and whatever secret, fearsome force they held—more curious than ever now.

*

The light of the sinking sun was spilled across the land, stretching the shadows in which the insects had begun to chirp and buzz, as Loki crept around the edges of the Aesir encampment.

After a little while he dropped into a crouch and stared.

The Aesir were not at all what he had been expecting. He’d heard them said to be only a little larger than elves, and from that Loki had assumed the same sort of earthy leanness, like creatures made all of sinew and bone. He saw now that he was wrong. Hardy they looked instead, with limbs thick from labor and ruddy from the sun, with braided hair and beards upon their faces. But stranger still was their manner.

Loki looked upon their camp and was reminded, oddly, of a swarm of bees, all endless purposeful motion, so much of it that it was difficult to comprehend any single part.

There were tents by the dozens. There was the noise of hundreds of men and their beasts all moving about at once, marked here and there with the shouts and crashes and sharp drumming sounds of work being done. The Aesir went about in gleaming armor, carrying gleaming weapons, their footsteps careless and their voices loud. Amidst it all wafted a mingled smell of horses and dung and cooking fires and the peculiar new odor of soap.

Loki watched and listened and sniffed at it all with great fascination, and he continued to stare for quite some time before deciding that a fox would never go unremarked in that mass.

Shortly after, he perched on the edge of a water barrel in the center of the camp, rubbing his front legs together idly, the iridescent green of his body glimmering beneath his glassy wings.

He had bobbed through the camp to reach that spot, multifaceted eyes taking in the strange new sights all around, the buzzing of his own wings matching the bustle of busyness. Until he drew closer to the center, to the massive tent that lived at its heart. Heavy fabric, rich red etched with swirling designs in filigree of gold, glimmering under the sun. But there was something strange about it, even to a fly. Around that tent there was a hush as the men kept their distance. A dead space into which none dared venture. 

A sense of anticipation thrummed through Loki’s body, wings humming against his back. He knew next to nothing of the newcomers, but there was something peculiar here.

The hush was broken by a shout as one of the Aesir approached the tent at a trot and halted before it, feet shuffling in the dirt. Another shout. And then a flap of the heavy fabric was thrown back and a new figure emerged.

In this form, voices reached Loki’s ears only as a low vibration, rising and falling and resonating in his tiny form. It was difficult to attend to any meaning the sounds might have had. But the sights and scents conveyed enough.

The one who had come running spoke and gestured, waving frantic hands toward the far side of the camp. Yet he kept his head bowed, his body bent, cringing before the other man, and the smell of sweat rolled off him, full of awe and fright.  

The man who had emerged from within the tent towered over him, massive broad shoulders brushed by a honey-colored mane. Huge arms bare from the short sleeves of the black tunic he wore, fine and decorated with intricate weavings in red and gold. And his scent—that Aesir smell, but layered with other odors that Loki could not quite identify. The sticky curl of Loki’s tongue flicked and flicked in the air, perplexed, intrigued.

When the large man, the general of this camp, nodded and made some soft murmured reply, the messenger quickly scurried away, and Loki—who had been engrossed in deciphering their mingled odors—tensed upon the wood of the barrel as he passed.

Loki stayed there, fragmented insectile mind piecing events together, long after both had gone, as all around the Aesir bustled in a mood of growing energy, preparing to go into battle, to kill or die on their general’s orders. Loki remained there until dusk came into the sky and the shadows deepened and the smells of the nearby mess became too enticing for a fly to resist.

*

Loki had never seen battle before.

He had heard tales of many, mostly before the time of his birth. There had been squabbles between different breeds and clans of giants, skirmishes over territory. But giants were solitary creatures, as a rule, and the realms were big enough for all to find their own place and then keep largely out of each other’s way.

When night fell Loki kept up with the Aesir army as they marched, his four legs zig-zagging him swift and silent through the wood in a wide arc around them so that he could follow without being spotted, without drawing attention to himself, and he had come to the clearing just ahead of their first ranks.

It was stony ground here, the bones of the earth just beneath the soil poking through in boulders and hollows, grey and black in the night. Not all of the shadows were empty, though, and not all the stone was dead.

Loki, with his antlers mingling with the branches of the wood, could smell the scent of storm giants. He could hear the low rumble of stone giants shifting where they crouched in wait, beneath the more distant patter and tramp of the Aesir army. The two groups of giants waited intermingled in the dark but paid each other little notice, as if they only both happened to be there for the same purpose at the same time.

Tense and motionless Loki studied them, curious at the sight.

He probably could have taken his own form and slipped in among them and gone unremarked. Any who noticed his presence would likely have shrugged their heavy shoulders and never bothered to ask his name.

Being alone in the shadows was better than that. Loki had always thought so. So there he remained, waiting to see what would come, curious for how the Aesir would survive that meeting, if they would.

Loki had never seen battle before, but he would not have imagined the sight of men pouring into the clearing in one great yelling rush from both sides at the resonant sounding of a horn, the sudden din with the clatter of shield and the Aesir’s furious cries, the faint glint of ax and spear in the gloom as they swelled forward.

But as numerous as the Aesir were, and ferocious and brave, the fight belonged to the giants.

The metal of sword shrieked and clanged hopeless against impenetrable hides as the Aesir yelled and threw themselves at their foe, and the answering rage of the storm giants felled a dozen Aesir at each blow from the backs of their hands, sending the men flying to land heavy and wounded and broken in the dirt, until soon the dirt was wet with the warm iron of Aesir blood. The Aesir swarmed, and the stone giants hurled them down, roaring.  Still undeterred, the Aesir fought and yelled and bled and fell.

In his hiding spot, Loki stood motionless with eyes wide.

On the battle went, and on, until the moon rose in the sky, its silver light spilling over the scene. And then the fortunes of battle changed with the sound of a roar that cut through the din and rose above the screams.

Loki’s ears twitched at the noise, and his eyes turned toward the far edge of the clearing where a massive shadow emerged. A shape in the form of a bear—but larger than any bear Loki had ever seen before, its fur gleaming dark under the moonlight as it paused for a single moment, sniffing the air before it bounded forward into the battle.

As it entered the fray there came another sound. A cry of Aesir voices rising as if in joy.

Spellbound, Loki stared, heart thudding in his chest.

Wherever the bear went, grey ancient limbs were ripped from their bodies. Giants knocked to their knees where their skulls could be crushed by powerful jaws. Once-fearless creatures shrieking and screaming and trying, to no avail, to flee. And with the tide turned, the Aesir became the wave, sweeping in where the bear had passed, slaying all that remained.

Loki, shrunk down small with ears folded over his shivering head, could only watch and tremble, terror quaking down his spine.

A little while later it was over, with the giants strewn dead or dying on the battlefield, throats slashed open by mighty claws, and the ragged Aesir army regrouping, carrying their wounded away. And Loki, still huddling in his hiding spot, caught only a glimpse of the bear-creature lumbering off into the forest, giants’ blood smeared across its snuffling muzzle.

Loki crouched there shivering until a rabbit’s madness overtook him and he followed.

The bear’s scent and its broken trail led deeper into the woods. Where the bear, slayer of giants, had waded through one of the tributary streams of a nearby river winding and chuckling away among the forest undergrowth, Loki leapt from stone to stone across and scrambled up its steep bank. Where the bear crashed through wild walls of briar and thorn, a small brown hare dived after through the ruin. And where the bear came to a circle of standing trees, the center of its ring open to the sky and its floor scattered with a soft bed of fern, Loki hopped close to the circle’s edge on soft, silent feet and watched in the dark, nose twitching.

The bear curled around itself, its great body rising and falling with its respiration. Dirt clung to blood on its paws folded beneath its huge head. Its deep black eyes blinked wearily. And then the moon mounted above the circle of trees shining down on the bear’s shuddering form.

The bear seemed to exhale. And then it was shrinking smaller, shifting and changing, and what was left behind was a far frailer form, naked and pale in the moonlight, head of honey-colored hair resting upon its folded arms.

The Aesir general moaned, a thin, weak sound, and the slits of his eyes closed completely. He lay there motionless, like a dying thing, as the night breezes whispered.

Loki continued to stare.

*

In later ages this tale would be told, of how the victory of the giants came in one swift strike against the true strength of the Aesir as it lay naked and vulnerable in a forest after battle. Loki’s name would be remembered as the one who felled him. The tale would be told among the giants as the last of the Aesir huddled fearfully in sparse and dwindling villages, their great weapon defeated and their hope gone. The Aesir lands would go back to wilderness, and the age of the giants would continue, little changed.

Loki knew that to be true as his forked tongue flicked out to taste the air.

Yet he slithered into range but did not strike at once but coiled, and he felt oddly pleased when the man’s still form subtly stiffened even before his eye opened.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Loki said as the man tried to futilely scramble away from scales and fangs. “I am fast and my venom is deadly, and you are weakened and alone.”

His voice had been a soft hiss but not from any serpent’s throat, and it was likely the sound of it, just as much as the command, that made the general go still.

“What are you?” the man asked in reply, eyes upon the serpent swaying mere inches from his bare skin.

“What are _you_?”

Loki watched through cold reptile eyes as the man swallowed slowly. The air around him took on a tinge of damp salt as new sweat sprang into being on his body.

“Thor,” the man said, his voice a deep hum against Loki’s drumskin ears. “My name is Thor, son of Odin.”

A snake’s mouth always appears to smile, at least from the right angle. “I did not ask your name. I asked what you are and where your fine fur coat has gone.”

Thor narrowed his eyes, and Loki watched him consider resisting—a creature who had just a little while ago been an unstoppable force bringing death; surely no little serpent could threaten him.

Though of course nothing could have been further from the truth.

Silence, the wind whistling in the trees, the two alone in the middle of the wilderness. The battlefield long since gone quiet, and much too far away. The peril of the empty night.

With another halting breath the defiance drained away and Thor’s shoulders fell. His eyes blinked slowly.

“What I am at this moment… is weary,” he said, voice dull. “If you mean to strike I would ask you to do it now, without delay, so that I may rest the sooner.”

“That is not the sort of rest you would like, I think,” said the soft slither of Loki’s voice.

Thor’s mouth twitched. “As weary as I am, it still might come as a relief.”

Loki swayed where he was, the night rustling around them, as Thor continued to gaze upon him.  

“So if you do not mean to strike, I would ask that you forgive me, for as much as I would want to know of you in other circumstances, serpent who speaks, I must go now to seek my bed or else I fear I will not reach it.”

Loki made no answer and made no move as Thor got to his feet, hands pushing on his knees, with goosebumps on his skin and his nakedness cast in shadow under the moonlight.

“If we meet again some other night, I will gladly speak to you more,” Thor said as he moved away on bare feet that crunched on the forest floor, and his ankle—the blue ridge of a vein visible under the skin, transfixing—passed near to the snake’s mouth.

Loki could feel the venom welled sour in the sacs behind his fangs, the fangs that could so easily slip beneath that pale skin. He envisioned this naked man writhing his last moments on a bed of dead leaves, dirt in his golden hair, long limbs sprawled out in his dying agonies. The Aesir’s defeat. The giants’ victory.

Loki did not strike, and that ankle stepped away into the darkness, heedless.

*


	2. Chapter 2

It was two weeks before they met again. At least, two weeks before they spoke; in all that time, the Aesir moved on toward wherever they might find more giants to give battle. They moved and camped and moved again, scouted and trod over untrodden hills, and they had in all that time an unnoticed follower.

Sometimes a raven perched among the branches as their ranks marched along beneath.

Sometimes a hart in the deep forest shadows, proud head turned to see them pass.

Sometimes, perhaps, a mouse stole close enough to nibble the crumbs that fell from their tables.

But the two of them only met again, as far as Thor would know, after the next battle ended. And this time, it was a badger that spied from the shadowy underbrush around this new clearing.

Thor, again pale and exhausted after shifting away from his bear’s form, curled over his naked knees to recover himself, and he gave no sign he knew he was being watched until Loki took a rustling step forward. But then his head jolted upward, peering around until he spotted gleaming eyes. And then he sighed.

“Hullo, badger,” he said, in a tone that meant he did not expect to be answered, the tone that one used with dumb beasts.

“Hullo, weary Thor,” Loki replied, and this time his voice was not a cold hiss; it was instead a soft whisper, low and breathy, the voice of a creature with dirt-streaked claws.

Thor blinked. “Serpent?”

The badger lifted and lowered its striped nose in a nod, and for a minute Thor said nothing, his frown deepening, the question in his eyes dancing like moonlight on a flowing stream.

“I had not thought I would see you again,” Thor said then, wondering.

The badger made no reply, deep in shadow under the trees.

Loki himself wondered why, _why_ he was here now and why he hadn’t struck when he’d been a cold reptile with fangs mere inches from tender skin. He was interested, he supposed—interested in these strange new people and in the outcome of the war and in what the future would hold. Interested in the first other shapeshifter he had met in ages.

He shuffled a few steps closer on his short legs.

Thor eyed him, curious. “I believed I was the only one," he murmured as if to himself. "How many forms can you take?”

Loki looked up, head tilted. “I have never counted. Many. Can you not take any shape that pleases you?”

Thor shook his head, glanced down at his hands where they pressed against the dark ground. The battle had left rusty stains on them, on the rough calluses and under his nails, and these had remained when he shifted forms. “Only the one you have seen.”

The blood on Thor was not his own; it was giants’ blood, and he reeked with it. Yet the badger found himself moving closer still, sniffing with his damp dark nose, and not in any intention of sinking sharp teeth into the man’s bare thigh. Though he could have.

“Why only the one?” he asked.

Thor’s brow knitted. “I had never thought it might be possible. I never thought to try.”

Loki paused where he stood, and it was barely more than a whim before it was done. In the space of a breath the stripes of dark and white on his fur had faded to a ruddy color that was grey in the dark of night. His limbs stretched and lengthened, his body became slight. He heard Thor’s intake of breath.

The fox then regarded the man, head tilted. “And how did a clever creature like you come to lead the Aesir to battle?” The fox’s voice was brighter and sharper than the badger’s had been.

The man chuckled a little at the insult, but his answering smile was sad. “One form like mine is enough to win such a position, when we fight a war like this.”

The brushy length of Loki’s tail twitched.

“And my father is the leader of all the tribes,” Thor went on. “It would have been my duty even if I had not manifested such a gift.”

“Ah, I see,” the fox answered, tail still twitching.

Twice now he had seen those battles. Twice he had seen the bear as it tore through its enemies, had heard the snapping of bones in its jaws. He had felt its roar trembling in the pit of his stomach until he’d cringed on his belly in terror, hoping only that he would be passed over as he hid clear on the other side of the battlefield in the shadows.

It was strange to now see that fearsome creature folding his arms around his naked legs and shivering as he spoke, goosebumps on his skin, sounding as if he took little pride or pleasure in it. Speaking of it as duty heavy upon him.

“But you have not yet told me your name or what you are,” Thor said.

The fox hesitated. It been a long, long time since anyone had spoken his name. He rarely gave his true one when he met other creatures in his travels. He had given countless names among the other queer little races, because it was far simpler if he never had any reputation to contend with when meeting new acquaintances. And among his own kindred—well, it did not often come up. And now it was his enemy asking for it. The one who was allowing the Aesir to spill across the realms destroying the life he had lived for half an age.

“I would be called Loki, if anyone called me,” the fox answered, limbs tense.

Thor smiled at him. “Well met, then, Loki of the many forms.”

A restlessness took over the fox’s body then, and he got to his feet, stretching his thin legs, looking at the man still watching him with solemn blue eyes made dark by the night. And when a sudden snapping of a twig broke the silence, the fox blamed instinct for his brisk departure.

*

The Aesir army moved on and Loki followed. He was a hummingbird at first, wings a blur in the corners of his vision and the unsettled feeling from the night before filling his jeweled breast, but after several hours the sensation finally calmed. He perched long enough to ruffle soft grey wings as a sparrow, then kept pace with the moving army among the branches, at last jittering down the mossy beards and peeling bark, the bushy grey of the squirrel’s tail flicking as they chose their camp.

Another battle. A third time of huddling in the dark, watching the bear’s black silhouette as it brought death to every giant who had come from the lands around to try to hold back the tide, every giant too foolish to run, every giant who could not see the danger in the swarming mass of pale-skinned men who shouted and clamored and banged spear on shield. Loki could not watch and could not look away, face buried beneath his paws, one eye peeking out.

When it was over, he found himself following again as that fearsome shadow dropped onto four stout legs and lumbered off into the woods; Loki followed, a fluttering, nagging curiosity in his breast pulling him along, making dark feet flash quiet through the underbrush.

When Loki caught up with him, Thor had already resumed his smaller, weaker form, and he sat up, a hopeful look on his face as he cast his gaze around himself, and the hope broadened into a smile when the little fox crept into view.

“Loki!” he said, sounding as if he had been waiting—as if Loki were a friend he had wished to see. “Where did you disappear to so quickly last time?”

The fox squinted its amber eyes. “I go where I please, when I please.”

“In whatever form you please,” Thor added with a grin. “And it pleases you to follow me.”

The fox halted where he stood, limbs straight, knees locked. “What makes you think I’m following you? What makes you think I don’t just happen to be traveling the same way?”

Thor considered this. “Do you travel much?”

“It’s merely how I’ve spent most of my life,” Loki answered.

But despite the edge to the fox’s voice, Thor seemed only intrigued, a hopeful look sparking in his eyes. “Will you tell me of your travels?”

Amber eyes narrowed further. “Why?”

“If you have traveled much then you must have seen many things, many parts of the realms that I would be interested in hearing about,” Thor said, leaning forward to gaze at him intently, a little smile softening his mouth. “But mainly I wish to know more of you.”

Loki was uncertain why this answer appeased him, or why he then complied.

Of course he was not going to tell the Aesir man anything important; he settled after a moment on a tale from his wanderings in Nidavellir, of a river that ran under the mountains. A place he had found by chance one time while chasing his dinner.

He had dived deep, fins flicking at his sides, eyes on nothing but the smaller fish that swam frantic ahead of him, and he had noticed nothing of where he was going or how dark and close it had become until it was not anymore—until the deep blackness gave way to a faint eerie light unlike the light of sun or moon. It shone on the other fish’s scales. It shone on the bottom of the waterway, the slick black stone. It shone all above and all around.

“I swam up to the surface then and found I was in a cave, its walls and ceilings all of blue crystal. That was where the light was from, though do not ask me how or why. All I know is that I have seen nothing like it before or since.”

Thor, who had propped his chin on his hand while he listened, made a sound of awe. “I would like to see that one day.”

“I’m sure you would,” grinned the fox. “But unless your bear form can breathe underwater, not to mention becoming very narrow and thin, you would never survive the swim.”

Thor’s frown turned rueful and he sighed, reaching out his hand toward the fox that sat on its haunches beside him.

Loki did not immediately bolt for the shadows, but he could not help the instinctive cringe.

Thor’s hand halted in the air just above the fox’s shoulders.

“May I touch you?” he asked.

Loki’s little white teeth could have made a satisfying rend in the man’s naked skin, had he chosen. But he only gave a tiny shrug, and then he felt the broad, heavy warmth of fingers stroking his thick fur, down past his shoulders and over the bumps of his spine.

He heard Thor sigh again as he petted him. “You are a clever creature indeed. I am glad we happen to be traveling the same way.”

Loki sat still for it for only a few minutes more, before he shook himself and got to his feet and darted off again, with one glance back at the man clambering slowly up from his knees as if he were only then remembering his weariness.

When Loki was a good distance away, he sat and twisted his body until he could stick his nose against his own side, snuffling at the fur that still bore the man’s scent, trying once more to place the other odor there, beneath the mingled smells of man and beast.

Eventually, frustration curling like fire in his belly, he gave up and bathed himself instead, rough licks washing the Aesir scent away.

Loki was still not sure why he had sought him out again, or why he had allowed that touch, the man’s hand gentle on his back, or why he had almost liked it.

*

In fact, he should not have allowed such a thing. He should not be awakening each morning anticipating the next battle for the chance to talk to an Aesir man. And most certainly not that particular Aesir, the one who turned each battle. The one who would be the ruin of the realms Loki had wandered for an age. Loki should not be letting that one stroke him. If they touched at all, it should be for Loki to rend his flesh with his teeth, to make blood pour down and watch him gasp until he died, in payment for all the giants he had killed, for all the ruin he had caused and all the worse harm yet to come. That was what Loki should be doing, not following him and _talking_.

Loki spent what remained of that night pacing.

When day dawned, the sun rising in a pale, damp sky, he was already some miles across the countryside, on his way to a lake he knew nearby. When he reached its still shores he dipped his paws into it and sank into the cold with a broad green shell on his back, swimming into dark waters pushing between his webbed toes.

He needed to know nothing but the subtle currents, the brush of water-weed. He needed to wash this feeling from his skin, to chill it from his veins.

When he surfaced much later he made his way back to the Aesir encampment. _Into_ it, where he had not ventured in weeks.

And he spent then many hours among them, mostly in corners and under tables, his eight dark legs spinning thread into webs as he watched and listened, as the ordered, tamed life they were spreading bustled around him.

These people were his enemies, laying waste to his world. Their general most of all.  

Loki watched the next battle in wolf’s form, but he brought the coldness with him when he stalked the bear’s shadow once more.

Thor would most likely be waiting for him again, smiling and asking for tales while he sat there in his tender bare skin, vulnerable and trusting.

This time Loki would do what he should have done the very first time. He would strike before Thor realized any need to defend himself. He would take him by surprise, end it in one great snap of teeth.

But when he found the pale Aesir man, Thor looked up with eyes rimmed in red.

Loki trotted closer, his tread becoming uncertain as he took in the sight.

Huddled around his knees, shoulders drooping. Miserable. He showed no fear as Loki approached, but it seemed less like foolish trust than hopeless exhaustion. As if, even if Loki were there to attack, he would meet no resistance from one tired and sorrowed beyond caring. When Loki came just a little more than an arm’s length away, Thor’s damp eyes squeezed shut and he heaved a sigh.

Loki should have lunged then. Thor would have had no chance against him. 

“What's wrong?” he heard himself ask instead. It was still a wolf’s snarl but a soft one, near silent.

Thor shook his head. “It is nothing. I’m weary. That’s all.”

“You are always weary after your battles,” the wolf said, still keeping its distance. “What is different this time?”

Thor took one deep breath after another, shoulders shuddering.

“Thor Giant-killer,” he said once he had recovered himself enough to answer. “My men call me that. And I would not mind except that they shiver when they say it. They fear me.” 

In the quiet, in the gloom, in distraction Thor began to pick at the ruddy stains crusted onto his fingers. Hands that had been massive paws, stained with blood. He frowned at them and rubbed at the skin, curled them into fists and dropped them to his sides as if to put them out of his sight.

Loki, who had come to tear out Thor’s throat, sank down on his haunches, watching with wary eyes, with uncertainty heavy in his belly.

“How did your people first meet the giants?” he asked as the silence stretched on.

Thor looked up again, gnawed his lip. “Why do you wish to know?”

“I told you a tale last time,” the wolf answered. “It is your turn. So tell me how this war I’ve been watching began.”

Thor considered this for a moment while his eyes dried.

“All right,” he said. “That... that was before I was born, when we dwelt in the far North…”

They had been little more than a wandering band, that first tribe of Aesir, eking out their survival in a hostile wilderness, he said. But it had all become worse when they came to a valley a little kinder than the surrounding hills but found a giant had already claimed the land.

“And a giant it was,” Thor said. “Ymir, the great ice giant, standing taller than the massive shaggy pines, his knees like boulders.”

The wolf looked at him. “I have heard of Ymir. They say he had lived in that valley since the realms were formed. So ancient he was more stone than living flesh, and with a mind to match.”

Thor gazed back solemnly. “I would not know. I only know I saw his bones when I was a child, his ribs standing like the bars of a cage in the place where his fall flattened the forest. I only know I was raised on my father’s tales of victory over the giant and how so many of our kin were lost that day. My people knew then that there was not room in these realms for both us and… them.”

The wolf stayed silent, eyeing him.

“We tried to offer peace a few times later. When I was nearly old enough to hold a spear there was a brief truce, but it did not last; the fighting began again for no reason we could ever discern. I don’t think the giants know reason.”

Loki snorted through his long muzzle. “Wouldn’t that be convenient.”

Thor frowned. “You speak as if I am wrong. What do you know of them, Loki?”

The wolf’s tongue lolled out in a vicious grin. “Perhaps you should try talking to one when you are not trying to kill it, if you want to know what they are like.”

Thor’s frown grew deeper at that. His eyes hardened, as if every battlefield he had ever seen his fallen kin upon were before him again. “No. Once I would have. But no longer. Or have you forgotten I am called Giant-killer?”

The wolf’s teeth gleamed in the light of the moon half-hidden behind fleeting clouds as the wind rose, and that wind blew Thor’s scent toward him along with a hint of far-off rains.

“I have definitely not forgotten that,” Loki said, the coldness still in his veins.

And that was all that there could be to that conversation; Loki could either make his lunge and stain his muzzle with Thor’s blood or he could leave.

He turned to slink away.

“Loki, wait…”

The wolf paused and looked back.

“Are you an ally of the giants?” Thor asked, uncertain.

Loki’s head tilted. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

“Even so… I’ve somehow offended you, and I’m sorry. Please…”

The wolf’s jaw shut. “I don’t think it is a good idea, after all, for us to be friends. Don’t expect to see me again.”

He heard Thor calling out after him, but he did not turn back.

*


	3. Chapter 3

Loki remained a few days more, making up his mind.

The Aesir army had long since moved from the wooded hills to the rolling downlands, and with the changing season the weather was growing wetter, the nights more chilled. As they moved again Loki followed as a raven flying above until the rain forced him from the grey skies, and then he followed from a greater distance, feeling laid bare by the openness of the fields.

At night he would watch as the Aesir’s campfires lit and began to burn with warmth and life. Points of light marking their place in the wilds, the fallen trees turned into fuel. Frogs croaked and sang in nearby ponds. His hooves sank a little in the muddy ground, the scent of wet earth and grass filling his nostrils as he paced out in the darkness.

If he had decided not to kill Thor—and it seemed he had decided that, every easy opportunity slipping past him while the strange anticipation curled in his belly and raced in his veins—there was no reason for him to stay.

It only made sense to leave. He was more social than his solitary kin, willing to speak to any creature with a voice, but he had grown attached to no one, and no one had ever grown attached to him. He looked out only for himself, and kept no one’s company more than a few days. He definitely did not care about the Aesir general.

And now… he had satisfied his curiosity about this new race of folk, and he could return to his travels. He could head far away from the battlefields, out into the deepest wilderness, wait out this war.

He followed just a little while longer, more trying to decide which way he would go than whether he would.

If the battle had not happened for one more night, Loki would already have been gone.

*

It was another damp night of cold rain, mists twisting amongst the reeds and shadows, and Loki could not resist going, in wolf’s form, to watch one last time.

The mists, though, swallowed up the companies of men and giants as they fought, and instead he found himself _listening_. The din, the chaos, disorienting in the dense and shifting greyness. Screams and clashes sounding nearer or farther away. He listened, heard the roar as the bear joined the battle, that roar that was by now so familiar that Loki’s hackles barely rose at the sound of it, fear only the faintest shiver in his shoulders. The wolf stared into the mist, listening as the bear raged.

But then, amid the shouts and the clatter of weapons, the roaring ceased.

Loki stood stock still, ears trying to track a sound that was no longer there, and he felt his heart pounding in a terror he did not understand. The bear had never gone quiet that way before, and Loki could not guess what it might mean. He began to run around the perimeter of the field, hoping to catch some sign in the formless grey.

And then he found one. A broken trail through the tall tangled grass, broad as the giant bear’s stride. With a smear of fresh blood down its center.

The wolf ran along it, the blood a dark path under the blur of his feet.

He did not have to go far.

Only a little ways down the trail, the bear lay slumped on the ground, as if it had escaped as far as its body would allow and then collapsed. Its snorting, wheezing breaths steamed in the cold air, and its wet fur clumped on its body. It panted, its massive paws twitching.

The bear saw him, and its huge dark eyes blinked. It made a small noise, a rumble from deep within its throat.

“Thor?” the wolf asked, coming closer on quivering legs.

The bear made no answer, lying there whimpering, and the rich, terrible scent of its blood filled Loki’s nose.

“Thor, you’re wounded. Take your other form and I will get you back to your people and they will… they will heal you,” Loki pleaded, hoping it was true. “I can’t carry you like this, though.”

The bear gazed at him, eyes unfocused, then the great body shuddered and became small. Naked and pale as he always was, but with blood oozing down his side from just beneath his ribs, pooling in the mud in which he sprawled. The cut deep and dark and glistening. His body shivered in the treacherous early chill. One hand swiped out sluggishly toward the wolf that crouched next to him, moving as if he thought it was still a paw. From his throat, another wordless, helpless sound. Looking up, dazed and blinking through strands of damp hair.

Loki held his own terror at bay and did the only thing he could think to do; he nuzzled insistently against Thor until the man had dragged himself onto Loki’s back, and then the back upon which Thor sprawled became that of a horse.

For a moment Thor’s arms wrapped around his neck while Loki snorted and shifted on his feet.

Then the man’s strength seemed to fail and he was no more than a limp weight, head lolling against Loki’s neck, legs dangling.

Loki did not dare run, for fear that his rider would fall. But he did not dare delay, either. Blood was running warm down his flank, in slow pulses. As smooth and swift as he could, he trotted back to Thor’s encampment, fear fluttering inside him.

“Be calm. Just a little longer,” he said when Thor came around enough to clutch weakly at his mane. “We’re nearly there.”

Thor’s answer was no more than a mumble against his neck, but his breath was warm and Loki cherished the feeling of it.

The first light of dawn had touched the horizon when they reached Thor’s camp, and Loki stood dazed as the men all scurried around him, lifting Thor down and shouting for their healers.

Loki stared after them, catching a final glimpse of Thor’s still, pallid form as they carried him away. Then he fled before they could think to wonder whence his mount had come.

*

There were no more battles for a while. The army did not move from its place; it sent out hunters rather than scouts, placed sentries, guarded its bounds. A pall fell over all the men, their mood dulled by dread.

Loki watched from afar, finding himself unwilling to take some form that would allow him to sneak near and see for himself whether Thor was recovering. Yet he also did not stray far, standing his own watch around the Aesir camp.

He remembered his terror from that night uneasily, uncertain why he had felt it so strongly and why it had driven him in a panic that made his chest seem to clench.

The weather stayed wet and foul, and one grey midday with the sun in hiding behind its blanket of thick cloud, Loki was sitting in a stand of trees not far from the little vale where the Aesir camp lay.

It had been a long time since he’d worn his own skin, and he pressed his back to the solid bole of the largest tree and tilted his head up to let the heavy drops splash onto his cheeks from the branches and leaves above.

Never in all his long life had he imagined such a thing as this. Lingering to watch over his enemies and finding himself unable to leave.

The knot of tension did not loosen within him until the day he saw from afar a familiar shape emerging from the red tent to walk a few steps under the pale sun. Even from that distance—watching as a hawk in the treetops—the shape seemed thin and shaky, unsteady on his feet, middle wrapped in white bandages. But it was Thor.

*

And by then it was the start of winter. Winter in Alfheim was gentler than in many of the realms. It suffered nothing of the bitter cold of Niflheim, bore nothing like the terror of the snowstorms of Jotunheim. But snow did fall, and with it an eerie quiet.

The Aesir army seemed to see the wisdom in sheltering where they were, at least for a while. Loki spent much of his time as a wolf with a white coat, slinking through the snow drifts, catching white hares for his meals and watching the movements of the men within their camp. The smoke from their fires was sharp against the scent of snow. They still worked, carrying on the business of living in the Aesir way, but the sounds were muffled. When they went out to hunt or forage in the white-covered fields, they went in twos and threes at least.

Except, one day, the general, who went out alone, a thick coat pulled tight around his body and fur-lined boots upon his feet. He tramped across the snow, making his way toward the row of hills, and onward until he was hidden from view of the encampment, and there he found an old fallen tree on which to sit, as if he were waiting.

The white wolf did not go right away, but neither did he make Thor wait too long.

Thor’s face lit up at the sight of him.

“You’re still here,” Thor said. “I wondered if you might have actually gone.”

The wolf made a motion that might have been a shrug; Loki, within himself, felt an urge to run close and reacquaint himself with the man’s scent, to rejoice in their reunion. But it was also the first time Loki had spoken to him in daylight, and clothed, and not drained from battle. It seemed wholly different to see him in this state, with his hair combed and braided, his skin clean and unmarked. Like this he seemed wholly Aesir, a creature far different from Loki, distant and removed. And though the long convalescence had taken its toll, leaving him thinner and paler, blue veins showing through his skin, he was now undwarfed by the shadow of the bear that lingered on him always when he lay spent and naked on the ground. And though the bear was fearsome, the man was somehow more intimidating to a creature like Loki.

It was also strange to think that it was the first time Thor had sought him out and not the other way around.

So Loki hung back. “Why have you come?” he asked, wary.

“To thank you,” Thor answered. “You saved me when I might have perished of that wound. I am in your debt.”

The wolf pawed at the ground and glanced away. “There is no debt. You were not difficult to carry.”

Thor nodded but made no move to depart, and he said no more but peered at Loki, expectant.

Loki felt his fur rising in discomfort to be so gazed upon. “I am glad you lived, but is there something else you wanted?” he snapped at last.

Now it seemed it was Thor’s turn for discomfort as his cheeks reddened and he too looked away.

“This skill we share,” he said at last. “Your mastery of it… you have shown me things I would never have thought possible. Please, can you teach me to do the same, Loki?”

Loki looked at him, thinking of the hand that had petted his fur. Thinking of the feeling of blood pouring down his side and the man’s arms thrown around his neck.

Then he shrugged. “I can try.”

*

Thor was not the best of students.

Loki had demonstrated the change from wolf to deer, from deer to mouse, from mouse to badger, and each time Thor had watched with a troubled expression on his face.

“I see what you are doing. But how am I to follow?”

Loki blinked back at him, trying to think how to explain something that should come as easily as breathing to anyone with the gift. “It’s not difficult. You just have to… want to do it, I suppose? Think of the form you wish to have and then take it.”

“I can’t.”

The badger’s eyes rolled. “Of course you can. How do you do it when you take your bear form?”

Thor’s frown deepened. “Not like that. I take that form when it is needed, when there is a battle to fight and if I do not then more of my people will perish. Not because I want it.”

“Did no one teach you any of this before?” Loki asked, exasperated.

Thor’s voice was rueful. “I wasn’t lying when I said I had never known anyone with this skill. My father told me I may have this ability from my mother, but I never met her.”

“Your mother?” Loki said, as a question occurred to him.

But Thor only nodded, and Loki was not certain, so he said no more.

“So how did you ever learn you could do it? Tell me how it happened the first time.”

Thor’s hands fidgeted with the edges of the fur coat he wore. “I’m not entirely sure. It was in battle that it happened, but I barely remember. I was young, and it was one of my first battles… I knew that we were losing and there was nothing I could do about it, and it angered me. Then…” Thor breathed a laugh and almost smiled.  “That first time I could not even comprehend what was happening. I wondered if I had been struck down and was dreaming as I died. I came back to myself practically alone on the battlefield, after the enemy were dead or gone and everyone else had fled in fear. I didn’t really understand what had happened until my father found me and explained that it had all been me.”

Loki took another breath and thought.

“Have you ever tried to do it for your own sake, not because it’s needful?”

Thor nodded. “Yes, but it has never…”

“Away from your camp, where you are not afraid of being seen or doing damage without meaning to?”

Thor didn’t answer.

The badger bared its teeth in a pointed grin. “Thought not. Try it now.”

Thor looked down at himself, around at the snowy landscape, then slowly began undoing the fastenings of his clothes and removing them. He folded the coat and sat on it to protect his bare skin from the frozen ground. He shivered anyway but seemed determined to endure.

On his side was a smooth, ruddy scar. Loki tried not to look at it.

And then Thor began, brows drawing together and face twisting with the effort. Another breath he took, and another. “I cannot,” Thor concluded far too quickly, rolling his shoulders.

“Perhaps don’t try so hard,” Loki said, shifting back to his fox form, thinking that might be more familiar. Not to mention that it was swifter, in case Thor did succeed.

As he took a few pacing steps while Thor made another attempt, he had an idea.

“When you shift back to your man-form, that is by your own will,” he said. “I know it is. So think of how it feels when you do that, and try to—”

He turned back to see Thor’s outline just barely shimmering, and he fell silent. A moment later, a bear sat next to the staring fox.

It lumbered to its feet, took a few steps, sniffed the air. It stood up on its hind legs, towering under the pale winter sun.

And then, after a few heavy breaths and a sneeze, it was a man again. Thor looked at him and laughed in triumph.

He tried his new trick again twice more before the look of pleasure faded for one of weariness. Then he pulled clothes and coat and boots back on, skin a blotchy red from the freezing air.

Thor smiled anyway. “Thank you, Loki.”

“We’ve only just begun,” Loki reminded him.  

“Then I will be back in a few days, when next I can, and you can teach me more. If you will still be here.”

The fox shrugged. “I’ll watch for you.”

*

“Far in the North there are great white bears,” Loki mused the next time.

Thor, in the middle of removing his clothes again, looked at him. “You have been to the North?”

“I told you, I have been nearly everywhere. But if you have seen them also, that will make things easier. I’ve been thinking: you already know how to become a bear. So try to become a white bear.”

Thor finished removing his underclothes. “I have seen them, though it has been years…”

“They’re hard to forget, though, aren’t they? And really, it’s just another sort of bear. It ought to be within your reach.”

The white bears of the North were fearsome things, never before seen in the downlands of Alfheim, and its roar a few moments later split the icy air. A flock of terrified blackbirds took wing from a nearby tree, rising like a dark and patchy cloud.

The fox gave a barking laugh. “A student not completely without promise,” he said.

*

Thor progressed swiftly after that, and the two spent more and more time together.

The day Thor achieved a wolf’s form, Loki led him on a chase through the snowy fields, romping through drifts that reached their bellies, snapping at him playfully, teaching him to sniff out the burrows of small things under the snow.

“You have to eat many of them to satisfy a hunger,” Loki said, crunching fur and bone and tiny squeaks between his teeth and gulping them down, “so you need to be able to do this quickly… Thor?”

Thor had backed away a step and was looking at him with distaste. “I will eat in my other form.”

Loki caught another of the furry little things as it jumped between his paws, but this time he only snapped its neck and dropped it onto the snow. “You don’t want to count on that. Here, try it. I’ve done the hard part for you.”

Hesitantly, warily, Thor lowered his muzzle toward the little dead thing, the splotch of red on the white snow. He sniffed at it, glanced up to his companion.

“Go on. It’s really not as bad as you’re expecting.”

Thor had his teeth on it before he dropped it again, body cringing back, trying to spit with a mouth not designed for the task. “No,” he said, apparently once he’d got the taste of mouse blood off his tongue. “Not today, at least. Show me something else.”  

Loki sighed. “Very well.” (Though of course _he_ didn’t let the mouse go to waste.)

If Thor would not hunt, then at least he could still track, and that was what Loki tried to teach him next.

“It’s a useful skill,” Loki said, leading his pupil under the trees, to where the snow was thin and patchy, with blotches of bare black ground visible between the white drifts. Where it would be possible to sniff out the criss-crossed trails of other beasts without having to do so through inches of crisp snow. “Not just for what it allows you to do, but also because you’ll have to trust your senses. Each form you take has its own advantages, and you can learn to use them to yours. There is a warren nearby. Try to find it.”

Thor looked at him then as if Loki had just asked him to fetch down the moon.

“Try,” Loki coaxed.

Several minutes of tangibly rising frustration later and Loki was very nearly ready to call it hopeless when the other wolf’s ears perked up, nose buried in a layer of damp leaf mould.

“Good. Now follow it,” Loki said, but Thor was already moving, a few careful steps at a time, muzzle skimming just above the dirt.

Once he got the hang of it, he learned fast, and Loki pushed him onward through every lesson he could think of, making use of all his senses, guiding him in what to notice.

After several hours, Loki realized that it pleased him, watching Thor catch on, watching him discover these parts of his nature. He could feel Thor’s pride each time radiating from him, and Loki felt himself reflecting it, sunlight off the water.

Thor’s new skill, at his instruction, pleased him. Thor’s triumphs pleased him. Thor’s happiness pleased him—and how had Thor gone so long, knowing so little about what he was, never exploring his abilities beyond what his people demanded of him?

At one point during in those hours, Loki was hanging back to watch when he caught a sudden whiff of a storm. His eyes scanned the sky, cloudless and wintry blue, and only then did he realize he had been smelling it before, for some time, never strong enough to place.

He watched Thor for some time after, still unsure.

When they returned to the place where Thor had left his clothes, Loki stood back to watch him turn into a man again.

“That may be your true form, but it is not all that you are,” the one remaining wolf said.

“What?” Thor asked, breath white in the wintry air and gooseflesh already risen on his skin before he could cover it in furs again.

“The wild is part of you, no matter how your people fear it and seek to destroy it wherever they go. You are not tame, Thor Giant-killer,” Loki said.

Thor stopped and looked at him, and for a moment they gazed at each other in silence. Loki’s gaze was keen, wolfish. In Thor’s eyes, though, a flash of uncertainty and pain.

Then Thor’s brow twisted and he turned away, pulling his coat around his shoulders, hunching beneath it as if trying to shrink himself into less than he was. He nodded a brief farewell, murmured a promise to return in a few more days, and Loki watched him picking his way slowly across the snow until he disappeared beyond the hills.

A few days stretched into a week, and into a second, before Loki began to wonder.

*


	4. Chapter 4

Into a third week Loki paced and wondered and worried, staying away from the camp out of stubbornness but unable to keep it from his thoughts. Perhaps Thor had fallen ill—if Aesir could fall ill. Perhaps something had happened. Or perhaps Thor simply didn’t mean to return at all.

At last Loki could wait no longer, and he decided to find out.

He crept into the Aesir camp again, at dusk, and this time he went straight for the large red tent at its center. And there, huddled in the shadows under a fold of fabric, he watched Thor through beady black eyes.

The general was alone, with a small brazier for warmth. He poured liquid the color of foxes’ eyes from a bottle to a small glass, then held it in his hand gazing at it a moment too long before he drank. Then he set both bottle and glass aside and gave a shaky sigh. Sat leaned over his knees, his arms resting on them, as if his shoulders were a great weight he could barely hold up. The dim flicker of the brazier played across his face, glowing copper on the messy tangle of his golden hair and the untended growth of whiskers on his chin.

It reminded Loki, oddly, of the way he looked sitting naked on the damp ground in the night, shivering as his sweat dried, exhausted and pale and alone in a way that had struck Loki with a wrenching pity he had never felt before.

“I’m glad to see you well,” Loki said.

Thor lifted his head with a start and his eyes cast about the room, panicked. “Loki? What are you doing here?” he said when he spotted the small huddle of brown fur, the long whip of a tail.

“Looking for you.”

They gazed at each other, mouse and man, and Thor looked as if he didn’t realize he was smiling, as if he hadn’t smiled in a long time. Briefly the smile wavered. “Does it not bother you, taking a form that you have… eaten?”

Loki shook his head. “You get used to it quickly. And it soon becomes unavoidable anyway; everything eats something. But tell me what has delayed you. I expected you days ago.”

Then the smile was lost. “I am sorry. I should have come to tell you. I wish to learn no more. What you have shown me already is enough.”

The mouse waited, black eyes glinting in the ruddy glow of the coals.

“You were right. The wild is part of me, though I do not know why. But I wish it were not,” Thor said, his face drawn and sad. “I cannot choose to do as you do.”

“That was not how you seemed to feel when you came to ask my help.”

“And I didn’t truly believe I would find you there at all. You said I would not see you again, and then you saved my life after, and…”

Loki’s eyes stayed fixed upon him as he realized what it was he heard in Thor’s words. “You’re just afraid.”

Thor buried his face in his hands, and his voice came out small and thin from between his fingers. “I am. And I don’t expect you to understand it. You told me yourself—you have spent your life wandering alone in the wilderness. If you have any kin, you have never mentioned them. You would not understand the responsibilities I carry, or how I fear to fail in them.”

The mouse’s tail twitched, its whiskers quivered. “But that is not the only thing you are afraid of.”

Thor looked up, mouth twisting in a frown. “What, then?”

Loki remembered his speculation, the mystery of Thor’s peculiar smell. He lifted his head. “Come out with me one more time, Thor.”

“Tomorrow,” Thor said, glancing to the edge of the cloth door, where the last fading glow of daylight was quickly slipping away.

“No, now,” Loki answered. “Put me in your pocket and we can go.”

Loki watched as Thor’s jaw clenched and as he sighed and as he knelt down to put his hand on the ground for Loki to climb onto.

The inside of Thor’s pocket was warm and smelled of him more than it smelled of the animal the fur had been stripped from. The rhythm of his gait was a steady drumbeat, accompanied by the crunch of snow as he passed through the gates and strode out into the wild lands around. Loki crouched within, eyes closed, mind wandering.

“How far did you wish me to go?” Thor asked after a while.

Loki climbed up to peek over the edge of his pocket. Night had fallen fully, and all around them the landscape glowed moon-pale. They were long out of sight or shout of the Aesir camp, far out into the empty fields. “This will do,” he said, climbing out fully and making the leap to the ground.

He landed on four somewhat larger paws, and the lynx’s eyes shone in the dim light when he looked at Thor. “Follow me.”

Thor did, quickly stripping off his clothes and taking on a similar form and running after in Loki’s wake. When Loki shifted into a deer, swifter still, Thor—too intent on the chase to hesitate—followed suit, and again through several other forms, darting through the chill dark night until both of them were panting from the exertion, white breaths and pink tongues as they ran.

“Very good,” Loki called back over his shoulder, laughing.

And soon he had led Thor far from his people indeed, far out into the wilds.

There he stopped in an empty field, in the form of a winter fox, white fur almost invisible against the snow. He stopped as Thor came to a halt a few short paces away, peering around at trees and stars and untrodden ground.

Loki watched and waited until Thor’s eyes focused again on him.

“Do you know what you truly fear, Thor?” he said. “Beyond the thought of failing your kin or losing this war. I know what it is.”

The other fox—larger and with fur the color of ash—stiffened slightly.

And Loki smiled, teeth small and sharp and white. “What you fear is the war’s end—because when the war is done and all else is domesticated, what will you be to those same kin you now protect? General, you go into battle only at night, the most dangerous time for battle, because you shudder to think that they might see you like that in daylight and then they won’t be able to think of you any other way. You know already that when the war ends they will not need you any longer. You will then become the only beast to fill their nightmares. They fear you now; when they no longer need you they will curse you and drive you from them.”

By then the other fox was staring at him, wide-eyed, breathing fast.

“That is what terrifies you.”

Thor shook his head, frantic, turned his gaze away. “It won’t happen. I am still Aesir, even if… even if I am also this.”

Loki sighed. “What was your mother’s name?” he asked. “You have told me that your father is the leader of all the Aesir tribe. But who was it who bore you?”

“I told you, I never met her.”

“Surely you must know her name.”

Thor looked down at his feet then. “My people say she was Jörð, the Earth.”

Loki couldn’t help it. He threw his head back and laughed. “You mean to say they told you that you sprung from the ground? Oh, no, Thor, I do believe your father may have planted his seed in rather a different furrow.”

Thor was staring at him now. So Loki spoke carefully.

“I have been to all the realms,” he said. “I have met all the races of beings that inhabit them. And I have found none that can change their shape but the giants, and it is a rare skill even among us.”

“Us?” Thor said, his voice hollow and fragile.

“Yes, Thor. _Us_.”

Loki waited for all the pieces to fall into place for him, and he saw the other fox begin to tremble.

“You are a giant?”

Loki nodded. “And so, I suspect, was your mother.”

“You are a giant.” A statement this time, crestfallen.

Loki shifted then, let Thor see his native form for the first time, two legs long and pale beneath him, wild dark-copper hair atop, and all over his skin tinged with cold blue-grey.

The frozen world was silent for a brief moment as they stared at each other, as blood-rage—habitual, ingrained, instinctive—ignited through Thor’s body in a swift cascade at the sight.

Then a bear’s great roar echoed off the hills and the true chase began.

Loki took his swiftest form, his footfalls fast and fed by fear, by terror, memories of blood and battlefields filling his mind. This was no playful chase between friends. He did not need to look back to see his death reflected in the white bear’s eyes; if he slowed enough for that he would feel its breath on the back of his neck, and then red would stain white fur, and it would all be over, with time for no more than a scream. He would not have a chance to say a word. So he ran without thinking, without hesitation, zig-zagging past obstacles and bolting across the empty fields.

But he was not truly trying to escape. He was only giving himself a moment to steel himself, to put enough distance between them that it would not matter when his steps briefly fumbled, becoming heavier, his form larger, darker.

Loki shifted in mid-stride and turned to face him.

Loki, in bear form, roared.

In the next moment, without a blink of hesitation, Thor had answered the sound and launched himself at his foe.

They tumbled over themselves in their fighting, a brutal, furious struggle. Loki expected at any moment that his throat would be torn out or his belly ripped open, for Thor was still larger. Thor had fought in countless battles, killed countless giants. The power of Thor’s attack was enough to leave him stunned.

But Loki had survived across the realms for an age before Thor’s birth, as every creature under the sky. He was sly and he was determined.

They fought, grappling with one another, and they were close enough to evenly matched that Loki ended up pinned against the ground, yet with his jaws clamped around soft flesh, teeth digging sharp into Thor’s throat. But not yet biting down.

“Will you listen now, Giant-killer?” he growled around a mouthful of musky fur. “Remember I saved your life, and that was after I had spared it when I came to kill you the first time.”

He could feel Thor panting, feel him struggling with himself, and Loki tightened his jaws until he felt Thor nod.

A moment later they had separated, Thor lumbering a few strides away, watching him warily.

“Why?” Thor asked.

“Did you really not know all along that I was your prey? Did you truly never wonder which beast was my native form—and did you not realize that I could be no serpent, no wolf, no deer? I think you knew, and you didn’t care. You craved it too much, simply having someone to speak to. Someone who would not fear you.”

Loki’s fur dissipated as he stood on his legs as a giant once more. A warning rumble from the bear’s throat, like distant thunder. Loki ignored it and stepped closer to stroke a hand through the bear’s shaggy fur, feeling the tremble beneath.

“See—you are already so alone among them. How will it be when the war is over?” he murmured, his own voice through his own throat.

The next moment, they were merely two naked men, one slumped in defeat.  

“If you are a giant… then why do you care what happens to me after?” Thor said, face upturned to look at Loki standing over him. “I have been killing your people.”

“ _Our_ people,” Loki amended.

Thor blanched, then put his head in his hands. For long minutes of silence Loki let him be, let the knowledge seep into him.

Then Thor began to breathe in gasps.

“Why did they lie to me?” he cried at last, in utter misery.

Loki tilted his head. “Perhaps your father didn’t know what you would become. He might have thought the lie would stay hidden forever—and then when they learned of your gift, how could they pass that up?”

“But if what you say is true… I have been killing my own kindred! I have hated my own people, all my life—the race of my mother, and they did not tell me! They named me _Thor Giant-killer_. How could they do this to me? How could they allow it?”

To that, Loki had no answer.

Thor’s chin trembled, his voice shook, but with determination, with anger. “I will not allow it. This war—I will not let this go on.”

Loki cocked his head. “And what will you do to stop it? I know you well enough already to know that your duty is to your people, your Aesir, no matter who your mother was. Do not try to pretend you are capable of abandoning them.”

“No, but I will not let them use me anymore!” Thor spat, anger twisting his expression. “I will not be their weapon. I will not be used to slay those I share blood with, by the hundreds, by the thousands. I will not. I will _not_. And they would not be foolish enough to continue without my aid.”

Loki nodded, contemplative. “Perhaps not. But it still will make no difference. At this point, the war has a life of its own. You have killed enough of our kind that the giants will not let it stop. They will be suspicious. They will want your people gone from their lands, and they will fight to make it happen. They will attack your homesteads, thinking it self-defense, and they will kill your women and children, your elders and your infirm, because they will see no difference. Your people will die, and what will you do then, Thor Giant-killer? Will you let it happen, or will you join the battle and intervene? And what of when your people scream for vengeance? The war will go on, no matter what you would choose.”

Thor’s jaw clenched. “Then I will speak to the giants as well and convince them that we truly desire a truce: they will stay away from Aesir settlements, and we will leave the wilds to them, and any who break those lines will be the only ones who pay in blood. Not innocents. Not whole realms. I will see to that.”

Loki opened his mouth to refute the idea and then closed it again. What Thor had suggested—it was remotely possible that it might work, at least for a time.

“I will not see either of my peoples destroyed by the other. Not while I live,” Thor added.

Loki had to smile at that, a little fondly. “Your mother may have been a giant, but believe me when I tell you, the other giants will hardly see the resemblance.”

Thor blinked at him. Studied him. And then a change came over him, more subtle than his other shifts in form, only a tinge of rust coming into his golden hair and a tinge of icy grey spreading over his skin, and the faint scent of thunderstorms that always clung to him—the scent that had confused Loki for so long—grew stronger.

“Will they now?”

*

The first thing to be done was for Thor to venture back to his camp, seeking confirmation of Loki’s words.

His father was not there to ask, many leagues away, having remained behind to rule over the population of Aesir carving out lives in the swath cut by their army. But Thor’s uncles were, Ve and Vili, who had advised him and served as his seconds in command, and Thor sought them out as soon as he had passed through the gates.

Loki spent most of that conversation again crouched in Thor’s pocket.

It was harder than he would have admitted, feeling the shudders through Thor’s large frame as his uncles hemmed and hesitated and finally admitted the truth. He felt Thor’s heavy, halting breaths as he asked all his questions. Why they had never told him. How many of the people knew. How Odin had met her. What the circumstances had been. Her name.

Thor was weeping by the end of it, quietly, with the occasional breathy sniffle, and once he stuck his hand in his pocket, and Loki pressed his small body against Thor’s callused fingers, for whatever meager comfort that could provide.

“So what caused you to guess?” said one of the other voices.

Loki felt Thor move as he took a breath, shifting his weight where he sat.

“I met another with the same gift as me. A giant. I have spoken with him much. He was the one who guessed.”

The other pair of voices were a clamor of shock and dismay and disbelief that he had been meeting in secret with their enemy; one voice warned him of the giants’ treachery, words trailing away as tension thrummed through Thor’s body.

“That does not matter, uncles. He was right. And this war must end,” Thor said, determined. “Send word to my father and tell him I mean to negotiate a peace. This war must end.”

That night, inside the red tent, Loki curled on the bed, black-furred toes stretching and splaying against the rich bedding, while Thor lay beside him.

“Thank you for accompanying me,” Thor said.

It was strange for Loki to be there, invited rather than sneaking around on his own in some nigh-invisible form. It was strange to be there, feeling safe and warm and… tame, drowsiness stealing over him as Thor began to stroke his fur, blue eyes gazing so calmly back at him.

Thor had stripped his clothes away before lying down, and it was strange for Loki to see him like this as well, not sprawled on the rough soil exhausted and battle-stained, but content and comfortable, warmth glowing from his soft smile.

Loki’s heart lurched with something he had never felt for another being before. Something he had never imagined feeling.

It made him want—want to curl closer against him, to press his nose against Thor’s skin and breathe him. It made him want to shift into his giant’s form just to lie naked beside Thor, where they could see each other and gaze upon each other and be aware of each other’s bodies. It made him want to bolt out through the door flap into the night.

But he stayed, all filled with warmth, with the strange, aching longing inside, and fell asleep curled up on Thor’s bed.

*


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *points up* Changed rating to be on the safe side, added new tags. Yup.

The second thing to be done was for representatives to be summoned from among the giants.

That was Loki’s task, of course.

“Are there leaders among the giants?” Thor asked, suddenly uncertain, as Loki prepared to depart. “Will the others follow whatever truce is agreed upon?”

Loki shook his head with a rueful laugh. “You really knew nothing of your enemy, did you?” he said, and a brief lesson followed. “So yes. They may… if the truce is a sensible one. If they think you’ll follow it and it isn’t skewed in your favor. There aren’t really leaders, but that’s because we rarely needed them. Giants are used to keeping to themselves.”

Thor nodded, thoughtful.

“I’ll do my best to bring a handful that others will listen to, though I can’t make any promises,” Loki added as he prepared to set off.

He almost surprised himself that he accomplished what he’d said, and the nature of that return meant that he was walking in his giant’s form as he led the little group of his kindred to the field that had been chosen as neutral ground, at the appointed time.

From across the slab of stone he saw Thor whisper something to the older man at his left, repeating it to the one at his right, and all three glanced his way.

Loki gave them a little wave.

When they got down to business, it all went better than Loki expected.

Not perfectly, of course, because nothing ever was, but no one was outright killed in the first day so Loki counted that a victory.

“So those are my kin,” Thor mused afterward. He wore a look that said he was rethinking many things, rewriting many of his beliefs inside his head.

*

The negotiations took many days.

Half the gathering around the stone slab were Aesir, and Thor’s face had grown stormy when at first they whispered and grumbled, eyes harsh upon him, voices raising with suspicion every time he tried to settle terms between the two sides. Eventually he had stood and flattened his palms on the stone, baring his teeth at his own men, muscles in his arms flexing.

“All of you know me,” he said, nearly a growl. “I am the same son of Odin you have always known. But if you would have me as your general while I killed for you but then scorn me when I seek peace… then perhaps I did not know _you_. I will continue to protect you and all our people. But there are other things I mean to protect now as well, things we all should have protected from the start if we meant to ever coexist with the rest of the realms. Thwart me at your own peril.”

The little speech shamed enough of them and stunned the rest to silence, and the giants looked on curiously, between Thor and the other Aesir. And thus the discussion went on, a little more smoothly.

“I think it will work,” Thor said that day as dusk fell, the deep blue sky of a spring evening arching over their heads after the rest had gone—the Aesir back to their camp, shutting the gate behind them, and the giants into the concealment of the forest some miles to the west.

Loki, still in his giant’s form, sat on the stone slab as the air grew chill with the early dew, his legs swinging under him. “Do you?”

Thor nodded, face aglow.

Loki knew this was supposed to be a victory for them both. He knew that he should be happy as well. But he wasn’t.

He remembered when he first began to hear tales of the Aesir sweeping across the realms. Bringing death and destruction, the giants said. Changing the lands behind them, like fire or flood, leaving nothing as it was. Cutting and ploughing, taming and domesticating. Loki had listened then, feeling unconcerned.

He had not been aware, as he continued on in his travels, that he was doing so with new fervor, aware in the back of his unconscious mind that this would be the last he saw of the realms in that wild state. Knowing somehow, even before he saw the newcomers, that the age of the giants was ending and the best he could hope to do was survive.

Now, because of Thor, that seemed no longer to be true, or at least much of the realms he had known would remain, for some little while at least. Doom was not breathing down their necks. He had time.

After all this was settled, he could return to his wandering, return to his life as if nothing had changed.

Yet instead of feeling pleased he was almost miserable, a hollowness in his belly, and he craned his neck back to look up at the stars as they emerged.

He had already set that life behind him, had already given it up and accepted the loss of it. He wasn’t sure he even wanted it back anymore.

And more than that, there was Thor.

Loki had studied him and followed him. Breathed his scent until it felt like part of him. Stared awestruck at the bear as it fought and killed, and laughed at the wolf too squeamish to eat a mouse. He had never before met anyone whose company pleased him so much. He had never met anyone so perfectly matched to him. And he had believed, for a little while, that Thor—sad-eyed, lonely, fearsome Thor—might need him as well, when his people turned on him.

But Thor had solved even that problem for himself, so Loki was left with nothing. Not the past he had known or the future he had come to hope for.

That night when Thor invited him back to the camp with him, Loki declined. He would not wheedle Thor’s company the way he once wheedled hospitality from elves and dwarves and water-sprites. He would not beg.

The sooner he adjusted to his solitude again, the better.

He shifted into the form of an owl, and he was not aware of the sorrow in Thor’s eyes as he winged off silently into the night.

Loki left, and he did not look back, no matter how much he wished to.

*

He spent the night as an owl, roosted high in the branches of a sticky pine, and he did not sleep, too tense and anxious to do so. As dawn spread in the sky he set out again, needing to be in motion, needing to put it all behind him.

But it was difficult, as he had no place he intended to reach. He spent the next three or four days wandering aimlessly, keeping mostly to the ground, heading into the forest where he would be hidden. Having no place to go but meaning to simply go _away_.

A full week passed before he became aware that he was being followed, and he could have taken to the skies again to escape, or otherwise made himself very difficult to find. But he didn’t. Perhaps it was listlessness, simply not caring. Perhaps it was hope, though he didn't truly believe in it. 

Now his ears perked up at the far-off snap of something bolting through the undergrowth, the silence as it paused for reasons unknown, the rustle as it began again.

As it got closer, Loki picked up the scent.

It was Thor. Thor, loping after him across a dusky clearing.

“Loki!” the other wolf cried.

Loki stood right where he was as Thor approached.

“Why are you here?” Loki asked. “Your negotiations…”

“They’re finished,” Thor panted, tongue lolling as if he had been running all day. Perhaps he had been. “I would have been here two days past if I hadn’t needed to stay for the last agreements. Why did you leave?”

Loki looked at him. “There was no reason for me to stay.”

Thor shifted on his feet, uncertain. “Do you mean you left because the war is done? Was that the only reason you followed me? Was that the only reason you wished to know me?”

Loki shook his head.

“Then why did you not even tell me you were leaving? Did I not deserve a farewell?”

There was grief in Thor’s voice, and it made unfamiliar feelings arise in Loki again, feelings he did not know how to make sense of. He wanted to tell Thor it wasn’t true, to deny it all. But he had fled, he had left, and he hadn’t wanted to say anything about it, because…

“I did not tell you because there was no _point_ ,” Loki spat. “It would have changed nothing. Even if I had asked, you wouldn’t…”

Thor looked befuddled. “If you had asked what?”

Loki laughed, dark with pain. “Do you know how few shape-shifters there are in the world?”

Thor shook his head like he was casting off water. “So why does that mean you should leave without saying farewell? If we are so few, why would you not stay and remain with me, as my friend?”

“Because I want to have you as my mate!” Loki snarled.

He instantly regretted it.

Thor blinked in shock, and Loki had been solitary for so long, had long since given up on finding anyone he cared to keep company with, that just that was enough to make him cringe and turn away.

“And you won’t want the same, so there is no reason...” he added in a mutter.

Thor was staring at him. “You want to mate with me?”

“I want you as my _mate_ ," the wolf that was Loki said, still without quite meeting his gaze. "Don’t you understand? I want to show you the glowing cave in Nidavellir. I want to hunt with you, and watch you hunt, and bring you gifts of tender prey.”

Thor’s eyes were wide.

Loki gave him a grim smile, thinking of it, hopelessly, and wanting. Speaking of the things he wanted, like dreams, knowing they could never be.

“I want to den with you in the winter, curling up beside you and dreaming for weeks at a time. I want to teach you to shift into female form and stuff you full of my pups and then let you do the same to me, until there are children of our line in every realm, and I want to groom you with my tongue until we both forget we were ever alone. I don’t know why I want it, but I do,” he added through clenched jaws.

Thor’s squirming was the wolf equivalent of a blush.

“But since it cannot happen, I mean to leave without delay, so that I may recover the sooner.”

Thor did not move as he turned to go, did not move until he was several paces away.

“Loki, please be my mate,” Thor said, hasty and desperate.

Loki looked back at him, eyes narrowed. “How? You are going to be among your Aesir, and if you think they feared to have _you_ in their midst, what do you suppose they would think of me?”

“I won’t be, though,” Thor said, with half laugh, a weak shrug. “That was part of the agreement. I will be dwelling on the boundary between the wild and Aesir lands, guarding it for both sides.”

It was Loki’s turn to stop short at the faintest plaintive tone to Thor’s words, the flicker of sadness in his eyes. “They cast you out?”

Thor shook his head. “They didn’t. I offered myself gladly. There is no one else better suited… really, it is the only way my plan could work. I will be proud to protect the realms in the way only I can.”

They had cast him out.

“Do you truly want to be my mate?” Loki asked then. “You want all those things I said?”

Thor looked at him and gave his fervent answer, and Loki was glad that in that form he could smell the truth of it, the change in Thor’s scent as his heart thumped wild.

*

Things did not change at once, but still change came swiftly.

It had been agreed that the Aesir would press no farther, and over the days that followed the Aesir army prepared to break their winter camp and move back to the last little settlement they had left behind, but no one disturbed the large red tent, even as the others around it drooped and sank and fell. Everything of Thor’s would remain.

Loki, flying as a hawk overhead, would every day report back about the little group of giants who had lingered at the edge of the forest, watching for the Aesir to keep to their promises. And every evening, he would trudge through the trodden mud, men giving him wide berth with wary stares, until he found Thor waiting.

“The truce still holds,” he reported, and Thor would nod.

Every night, the fox would curl up beside the man, stretching his toes idly against the bedding.

“I will miss it,” Thor said one such night, contemplative. “But perhaps not as much as I thought I would.”

“Has your father sent word yet?”

Thor sighed and ran his fingers down the fox’s back. “Yes. The letter came in today. He will honor the truce. And he will be able to travel in summer to speak to me in person.”

Loki rubbed his ears against Thor’s arm, unsure what else could be said.

*

The first night after the Aesir army disappeared across the horizon, a bear sat all night in the middle of the old camp, silent, solemn, sullen, with a fox at its side.

The second night was much the same, though the air was colder, the stars above glimmering points of light.

In the middle of the third such night, the fox waited until the bear’s head drooped and then gave its flank a sharp nip.

The bear raised its head, eyes blinking, with a loud huff, and the fox bounced backward, leapt forward, another teasing nip.

Another snort through the bear’s damp nose.

When Loki leapt back again, it was with a concurrent shift in size, growing larger, fur deepening in shade from red to nearly black until he was almost the mirror image of his companion.

The nudge this time was just as playful but far harder to ignore, and Loki kept it up until Thor shook off his mood and gave chase.

Loki led them away from the mournful, muddied remains of the camp and out into the wild lands, turning and knocking Thor to the ground when they reached a sheltered little clearing, the half-moon just rising over the trees.

There they wrestled, low whines pushed from lungs with playful shoves, brief bites. Sniffing and breathing each other’s scents until play became something else—until Loki was letting himself be pinned, massive arms grasping at his waist to pull him close to be rutted, and he was moving to allow it, letting Thor slip inside. He could feel Thor’s hunger in the humid breath on the back of his neck as Thor gripped him with teeth as well, powerful jaws closing just hard enough to hold him still, and excitement curled in Loki’s belly.

For two shapeshifters to mate—Thor surely didn’t know what was coming, but Loki could feel himself already slipping under, panting, trying to twist to nip at Thor in return, wanting to look into Thor’s eyes and see that he was succumbing as well.

For two shapeshifters to mate—when they had found their mate, the one they loved—was to be truly wild. It came like an irresistible instinct, rising up to overtake them, too powerful to resist, and for a little while they would be beasts in truth, all thought and reason gone, wanting nothing more than to be closer, deeper. To grip tighter and growl in possession.  

Loki braced himself as it came on, reveling in the feel of it, the heat and pleasure in the place where they were joined, the smell of sex enveloping them. The fading of everything in the world that was not them. Thor’s teeth clamping tighter just before he stilled, briefly, and then began to move again.

Loki, who had wandered the realms alone for an age, who had never thought to stay anywhere, to be joined to anyone—

His reason fled soon after that thought and only returned after it was done, when Thor lay next to him sprawled spent and panting.

But Loki had his mate now, and he nudged at him to roll over. Lapped thoroughly at his softening organ and the soaked fur around it, craving the taste. Cleaning and tending to him, and feeling himself pleased at the way Thor whimpered but did not try to move away.

After a few minutes of such licking, Loki’s interest began to rise again, and he let his tongue wander lower, filled with tenderness and curiosity, wanting to know whether Thor would be receptive to him, shivering at the musky taste as he anticipated it, and Thor wriggled against the pace of Loki’s rough tongue on his soft flesh. The thought made Loki thrill, already imagining the feel of his own teeth on his mate’s scruff. Wanting to rut him into mindless need and whining, panting release, again and again, both taking, both giving. Wanting to murmur to him to shift forms to each new one they might try, until they knew each other in every possible way.

The mating of two shapeshifters could last a very long time.

Much later Loki climbed up to nuzzle at his mate, licking, nipping. And when Thor’s eyes blinked open, he looked utterly silly with happiness, gaze tender and warm, laughing as Loki licked a wet stripe across his cheek.

Whatever happened between Aesir and giants, they would no longer be alone. They had found each other, and they would be together, two clever creatures with wit and skill and the will to survive.

*

This all began when the realms were young.

The peace, of course, did not precisely last. The lines were redrawn now and then, and troubles from time to time arose between Aesir and giants, the newcomers and the ancient wild. But more often these were no more than squabbles. Sometimes, too—though rarely—they ended in the new way, with strange but pleasing bonds, with friendships forged, or more. With children born and families formed, until there were quite a few inhabitants of the realms who could cross those bounds, who were born of both worlds. Until there was trade in goods and exchange of tidings and cautious alliances. Until it was not a peace hard-won and hard-kept but a gentle stability, a balance that would keep itself, despite occasional bouts of noise.

Curled in their den one day, Loki watched over his sleeping mate.

Thor’s grief had faded with time. His father had visited several times, difficult meetings that left Thor unsettled for long after but which he insisted he was glad of anyhow. But Thor's anger, his betrayal, the loss of his former life and all he had believed it to be—Loki had done all he could to soothe and distract him, and now it seemed to bother Thor only rarely, the old memories arising. When they did he would sometimes be seen in Aesir form, sitting upon the ground wrapped in an old fur coat, gazing off at the horizon. Or as a bear, lumbering lonely through the forests that spread across the borderlands.

But mostly, what Thor held onto was his duty, his responsibility.

Loki understood that, and for many years they were as content there as they could be. But after a time, a restlessness began to tinge Loki’s steps, no matter what form he wore. The world was changed.

“Wake up,” he murmured, squeezed against Thor’s warm body. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

Thor gave a soft grunt as his eyes opened, as he rolled to pull Loki closer. “What is it?” he asked, a sleepy sound.

“I’ve been thinking,” Loki said, and by that time Thor knew him well enough to chuckle, burying his face in Loki’s fur. “I think it’s time.”

Thor’s reply was muffled. “Time for what?”

Loki paused to nuzzle at him, tongue swiping out to bathe him in long licks, a blatant ploy, and he didn’t speak again until he felt a little rumble of pleasure in the other bear’s body. “Do you remember that cave I once told you of, in Nidavellir? Do you still want to see it with me?”

Thor stayed silent, letting Loki continue to groom him.

“I don’t think we need to stay here any longer. We could go wherever you want,” Loki added between licks. “We could go into Aesir lands and visit your family, if you’d rather. I’m sure I could find ways to amuse myself while we’re there.” He pulled back for a moment, just enough to take in the sight of Thor’s face, his brows drawn close, anxious and uncertain. “But I don’t think we need to stay. Your duty is done. The realms are different now.”

“Give me some time to think on it,” Thor mumbled at last.

*

It was sunset that day—a chill late autumn evening, the trees half bare and the ground blanketed in crunching rust-brown, the sky clear azure deepening at its edge—when a bear sat gazing out at the horizon, and a little fox beside him.

Thor looked toward Aesir lands, and there was, for just a moment, longing in his eyes. But then it was gone, and he turned to his mate.

“I would like to see that cave you told me of. I would like to see all the places from your tales,” Thor said.

Loki’s heart beat faster, excitement humming through him at the thought, like a flutter of wings. He had so much to show him. They would go as whim took them, across rivers and forests and plains as Loki long ago had, but he would be seeing it all anew, because he would have Thor beside him.

The realms still were young. And they would be the gods of the wild, wandering together while the wolves of the sky endlessly ran.

***

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! That's it! Thank you to everyone who's been reading, and I really hope you liked where this story ended up. And thanks again to Pyrebomb for the inspiring prompt! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is loved, here or on [tumblr](http://illwynd.tumblr.com/tagged/wtrwy)!


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